Tuesday, May 23, 2006

I am very excited about this great new tool from Hydrus Software that allows you to work with typed DataSet objects without DataAdapters or writing your own sql statements. Basically, it infers database schema from your typed dataset and uses classes called WhereConstraints that limit the results in various ways. It's even fairly easy to write your own constraints if the included constraints don't do the trick.

The DataSet Toolkit saves all the time you would normally spend writing specific queries, or maintaining the code you write for the adapters, etc. I can think of several projects where it was a daily job to update dataadapter statement code every time something changed about the database. With this tool, you can ignore that stuff. If you are used to working with the .net framework CommandBuilder objects, then you still have to write select statements. The DataSet toolkit removes this job too. Pretty cool.